Ron DeSantis just gave Florida's highest civilian honor to a man who once walked into an MLB front office, handed them a blank contract, and told them to fill in whatever number they wanted.
That man went on to win the National League MVP that same year.
Ron DeSantis gave the Governor's Medal of Freedom to the man who once handed baseball owners a blank check.
From Miami's Backstreets to Cooperstown
Andre Dawson didn't get recruited out of high school.
Nobody came knocking on his door.
He took out student loans to attend Florida A&M University in Tallahassee and walked on to the Rattlers' baseball team – an HBCU the national press has never written a glowing word about unless they needed to shame someone.
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His uncle, Bob Hayes, had played cornerback there before him.
When the Montreal Expos drafted Dawson in 1975, he became one of only two HBCU players in history to reach the Baseball Hall of Fame.
Over 21 seasons, Dawson played in more than 2,500 games, earning eight All-Star selections, eight Gold Glove Awards, and four Silver Slugger Awards.
He finished with 438 home runs and 314 stolen bases – putting him alongside Willie Mays and Barry Bonds as the only players in Major League history to clear 400 home runs and 300 stolen bases.
The Blank Contract That Changed Baseball History
Here's the part your sportswriter friends probably forgot to tell you.
Before the 1987 season, Dawson was 32 years old and one of the best players in the game – and not a single team would make him an offer.
Baseball owners – wealthy suits who spent years lecturing players about the integrity of the game – had secretly conspired to freeze out high-priced free agents.
They drove down salaries while MLB revenues climbed 15 percent.
Dawson and his agent walked into the Chicago Cubs' spring training facility in Mesa, Arizona, and handed general manager Dallas Green a contract with the salary line completely blank.
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They told him to fill in whatever he thought was fair.
Green filled in $500,000 – his own agent called it less than half of what Dawson would have commanded in a fair market.
Dawson signed it anyway.
That season, on a last-place Cubs team, he hit 49 home runs, drove in 137 runs, and won the NL MVP Award.
The owners eventually paid $280 million in arbitration damages for what they did to players like Dawson, and he later received the inaugural Curt Flood Award from the Players Association for his role in fighting the collusion.
The elites cheated him.
He beat them anyway.
DeSantis Knows Exactly What He's Doing Here
The national media has spent years painting DeSantis as hostile to black history and black institutions.
They're wrong – and this proves it.
When DeSantis places the Governor's Medal of Freedom around Andre Dawson's neck, he's honoring a Miami kid who borrowed money to attend a historically black university nobody in the national press could find on a map, and built a Hall of Fame career by refusing to quit when powerful people gave him every reason to.
"'The Hawk' has represented Florida in the best possible way for decades," DeSantis said. "His generous support of FAMU and its baseball program has helped generations of student-athletes succeed."
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Major League Baseball renamed its annual HBCU baseball tournament the Andre Dawson Classic in 2018 – an event that airs on MLB Network and puts HBCU players in front of scouts nationwide.
Dawson joins Bobby Bowden, Jimmy Buffett, Barbara Nicklaus, and Lee Corso on the medal's short list of recipients – a coach who built a dynasty, a musician who turned a laid-back lifestyle into an empire, and now a ballplayer who handed a corrupt establishment a blank check and made them regret every dollar they underpaid him.
Florida doesn't need the national media to tell it who its heroes are.
It already knows.
Sources:
- Fox 49 Staff, "DeSantis awards Governor's Medal of Freedom to Hall of Famer Andre Dawson," Fox 49, October 19, 2026.
- Alexa Ryan, "DeSantis Presents Governor's Medal of Freedom to MLB Hall of Famer Andre Dawson," The Floridian, October 19, 2026.
- Staff, "Remembering when Andre Dawson offered the Cubs a blank contract," MLB.com.
- Staff, "Dawson's deal changed history," Baseball Hall of Fame.
- Staff, "How Andre Dawson continued Curt Flood's legacy of protecting players' rights," Andscape.
- Staff, "Andre Dawson still helping grow the game through Florida A&M, HBCUs," MLB.com.
